Monday, April 4, 2011

Awesome April!

Hello all! Can you believe it's the start of a new month?? Things is Bratislava have been a little quiet. I can't help but feel that the past two weeks have just been the quiet before the storm. The weather has been near perfect. Around 18-23 degrees (Celsius that is) and the people on the streets are a lot more open to talk to us. Plus, the most fantastic ice cream place near OId Town reopened. :)

Despite all that we had an extremely slow week in terms of teaching lessons and finding people, but we are convinced that that will be changing. The mission home announced that this month will be "Awesome April". Each week will have a special focus beginning with the Restoration. I think it's perfect to get us pumped up and keeping things fresh. On the 6th we will be handing out at least 20 Restoration pamphlets and setting up at least 10 meetings. This will coincide with the 181st anniversary of the organization of the church by the way.... the week after that will be member week, where we will have a special focus on working with the members. After that will be a finding week with one whole day blocked off to just find and talk to as many people as we can. As a mission we are all very excited and I definitely feel more unified with the Czech side of the mission as they will have the same goals in mind. Yesterday we started the month off with a special mission-wide fast. We expect miracles this month!

I realized that the city of Bratislava has 4 baptisms on the board which is so exciting! All of them are solid and really have a desire for it, however, everyone is a little on edge about them all because they never have time to meet with the missionaries- which is so important for people preparing for baptism. But everyone here has been keeping their attitudes up and working hard.

Sano, our deaf member, has now been coming to every activity, though he missed church yesterday, I think he worked. I've been relearning a lot of sign language and he's been teaching some of the other missionaries. Which is so good. If I stay in the city for a long time I'm going to come home my signing will have a lot of Slovak in it! Sano has actually been helping with my Slovak too. Sometimes I'll know how to say something by signing it, but then I think, "ok, how would I say that in Slovak??" I've been finally able to visualize Slovak! Maybe now I can actually make some headway in the language. A member told me my Slovak could be better, BUT she said the Slovak I do speak is spoken with a very good accent. So I have something to be proud I guess.

So how was conference everyone?? Us missionaries can't wait to watch it! We won't see it until next week when we get the dvds with Slovak/Czech dubbing. We'll watch it during lunch throughout the week. It'll be fantastic!

Well everyone, I hope that this will be a good week for all of you, thank you Tara for the letter (finally...) It was good to hear from you :)